I’ve been so frustrated this weekend. I felt like the universe was once again against me every time I compressed and re-encoded a certain piece of video I recorded on Friday. Yet, as I should have assumed the whole time but was too frustrated to think about, it was user error.
I was invited to attend a party on Friday night in the Hollywood area. Although I was nearly 5 hours late, the party was in full swing by the time I found parking and walked a block to the apartment. I decided to stay longer at this party since I was able to spend time with friends I don’t see often and there was plenty of company to enjoy and people to get to know.
By the end of my visit, the majority of what was as many as nearly 85 people in one large 4 bedroom apartment, 1 bathroom apartment, there were several intoxicated people who decided that for no good reason they would allow anyone to do something random and entertaining to them. One guy got a buzz cut, the other was wrapped with adhesive tape.
I decided the adhesive tape was just the event that warranted my camera’s video feature. When I decided to try and upload the raw video taken off of my camera, Youtube told me to get lost. There’s supposedly this limit of 100MB per video, something of which I had no idea until that moment. In fact, I’ve never had a Youtube account until this past weekend. Maybe I’ll utilize my video feature on my camera more often now in light of this.
I then began what turned into a more than 48 hour event. I spent time researching free video editors and recognized one called VirtualDub since I had used that years earlier to compress and re-encode a DVD so that I could burn it onto a regular CD-R.
After tweaking some of the settings, I began my compression; simple as pie but took about 10-15 minutes. No big deal. I opened the newly compressed video, pushed the playback button and was happy with my initial result. As I skipped to the end of the video, I noticed that there was no sound after the 5 minute mark. What’s going on?
I tried it again, and again, and again. Same result with similar settings. I downloaded some new editors listed. Nothing was different. Then I began the process of downloading some “trial” versions of the big boys software for the Mac. If any operating system was designed for video rendering, it is the Mac. It’s a staple in the entertainment industry for video, audio, and graphical rendering.
I downloaded two “trial” versions only to realize I was missing one or two things that prevented me from even installing them. I waited nearly 24 hours for one of them to download! By this point, I’m completely frustrated and have spent a late night trying to figure out what is going on. I gave up at nearly 5am as it just wasn’t worth sacrificing anymore of my time.
This afternoon, I decided to try it out one more time. Ugh. What could I possibly be doing that’s causing this weird behavior? Then I rechecked the settings I so carefully choose to use. Aha! Could it be that by recapturing the frame rate at 24fps I am causing an originally encoded 30fps video to mess up?
Duh.
Me and my bright idea of turning a NTSC standard frame rate into a US cinematic standard frame rate without even considering the 3:2 pulldown was the result. And here I thought I actually knew what I was doing for the past 48 hours, thinking my idea was genius.
And now, hopefully after what I assume was a completely success compression, is The Adhesive Tape Mummy video. Those hairs on his upper lip… don’t worry, they’re from the guy who got his head shaved. I promise.